Of Holiday Weekends

I tried and tried to find a picture of a cat wearing overalls and a straw hat, but failed. Evidently, you can buy little overalls for a cat, but I doubt I'd get them on Cheeky without losing some skin or fingers.

This was a four day weekend for me -- hooray! A year ago I was in Hawaii soaking up the sun and beauty, but here I am soaking up cold Washington winter. Not that I have anything to complain about, compared to my Eastern friends, and especially since we had a lot of lovely sunshine last week. But Friday and Saturday were super cold and windy. Today it was cloudy again and spitted a bit of snow and sleet.

On Friday I helped put on the Sweethearts' Banquet at church. I arrived at the church around 10:45 and spent the morning and afternoon setting up, decorating, overseeing skits, practicing music, and keeping the young people on track. As I mentioned earlier, we did an Italian theme. Everything turned out great! We rented "Roman" columns and had lots of ivy and grape stuff everywhere, which looked very cool. Rachel did a smashing job on all the Italian food, and the program went very well. Usually we have a speaker or video of a very marriage edifying nature, but this time (partly because we didn't know what else to do), we went for a more light and entertaining program. As I watched people laugh their heads off, I realized that was exactly what they needed to do. Laughter lightens cares and draws people together. So praise the Lord everything went well!

I got home about midnight that night, exhausted and cold. I slept late on Saturday and spent the day reading, catnapping, and generally recuperating.

Last night I took Zach, Jessie, and Zoe to a promised trip to the ice rink! As we watched the Olympics opening ceremonies last week, I mentioned something about ice skating and learned they'd never done it. So I suggested I ought to take them sometime and they totally lighted up at that. It worked out nicely to go last night. They were so excited! I expected to get them started on the ice and sort of show them how to do it, but they went boldly out on the ice before I even had a chance to! Zoe took to it like a duck to water. Falling down a few times didn't phase them at all; in fact, Jessie proudly declared afterwards that she'd fallen down six times! I'm no Michelle Kwan, but I can generally stay upright and move along at a decent speed. I was feeling more and more comfortable and even thinking I was doing pretty good, when WHAM, I tripped and went down flat, landing hard on my right knee before I sprawled. Fortunately my hands were in gloves or they would have really burned, but my knee still hurts. Of course that happens to be the same knee that has been pummelled in bike accidents, car accidents, and volleyball crashes. Aaargh! I lost some of my enthusiasm after that, reflecting a trifle bitterly on how easy the Olympic skaters make it look. All they're worried about is landing their quads and triples, and I'm worried about skating in a straight line without falling down!!

Anyway, the kids had a blast. I was a super indulgent auntie and bought them drinks and chips and McDonalds food afterwards. Then I decided to rent a movie. I couldn't find "Cool Runnings" but settled on "Beethoven" which they enjoyed.

Today we slept late and then went to a fun furniture store. This place not only has a ton of furniture, but it's also laid out very interestingly with all sorts of cool things to look at. My mom got a little bench for the front hall and I got a sofa table thing that has shelves and drawers in it. It's for my music room to store my ton of music. It's a lovely cherry wood that matches my harp perfectly and fits into the room beautifully, so I'm quite happy with it and glad to get my music in order.

So that's my exciting weekend in a nutshell. We're looking forward to having Jill and Jed here next weekend!!